So do you have a RaspberryPi not doing anything at home? Got that 2GB class 4 SD card that you just don’t know what to do with it? Well this guide is for you! It will let you turn your Pi in to an IOT alarm clock, no code, no complicated commands, just flash, edit two text files and you are good to go. The alarm clock is controlled from Telegram, so you can set it and turn it off from your smartphone. I find that usually using my phone wakes me up. So it’s useful for me. You can also edit the alarm and use any mp3 file you want.
The code is all available in github. AlarmBot is the Telegram Bot. An AlarmPi is the distro (built with CustomPiOS yet again). (more…)

A short post to announce a small piece of software I released today on github for the ham radio people.
I give you SvxlinkWrapper, this wrapper sits on top of Svxlink‘s stdout and stdin and processes it with python. Making it easy to add more advance features to Svxlinik. Since Svxlink is written in C++ and takes a while to compile, this wrapper really speeds up development. Furthermore, it uses straight.plugin making its simple to write more modules by extending SvxlinkwrapperModule and placing it in the modules folder.

Currently the to modules that SvxlinkWrapper has are for auto-connect to Echolink nodes on startup and another for a QSO logger for Echolink connections. There is also a module that should let you send commands over the Echolink chat, if you extend it. This lets me open and close repeater connections directly from the Echolink chat box.

Hey all,
After a few weeks of bouncing emails with Thomas Perl I am happy to announce that we have a working plugin for his wonderful podcast application called gPodder. With this plugin installed, any mp4 video podcast that is downloaded with gPodder is automatically converted to a format playable by rockbox MPEG player plugin. Effectively meaning seamless sync of video podcasts to any rockbox enabled device. I am specifically using the Sansa fuze player, but just changing the screen resolution at the top of the plugin should make it work with any other rockbox device, and with the right screen size. The final product for me of all this technical stuff is that I can listen to TED lectures in the car. Or using the verb was coined by my friend Uzair “TEDding” from my car.

How to Install

First you should have gPodder installed (available also as “apt-get install gpodder” or any other distribution install equivalent).

I am releasing here set of instructions and source that will enable anyone to set up a phone number, that if you SMS it, will post your massage on to your own twitter account. This service is called “Twiter SMS Gate”. The service handles multiple users, and should be easily modified to support other services like statusnet (and with a bit more code maybe even other social networks). The SMS hardware required is any cheap cellphone that can work with gammu-smsd (mine is a fake Nokia from India). Twiter SMS Gate also lets users easily register to it with their own cellphone.

I hope that people that like this idea would start hosting more SMS gates, as we create a wide network of those around the world. SMS Twitter Gate-IL , The Israeli Gate, has been running for a few weeks now and even got covered in the local media here.

The source is written in Python, which includes the phone hardware hooks, webserver, twitter client and database access.

Here is the cellphone used to run my server, just to show you how simple it is to do this, no super-expensive hardware required! (server is also my personal Linux-running PC:

Fake Nokia Cellphone acting as a dedicated SMS server

Source is available here on GitHub, along with basic instructions on how to set it up.

Apparently there are tools to do transliteration (converting Latin letters back to Arabic), and also translation. But nothing that does them both. That is why I wrote a small script that uses Google’s transliteration service and ‘Google Translate’. This does the job, but is not perfect, however, it does actually help me understand some messages.

Hi all,
During last semester I developed a set of scripts that lets me photograph pictures of the blackboards during my university courses, categorize them while I am taking them and automatically generate PDF document for each course week. Because physics equations are not the simplest things to input in to a laptop in realtime, I have developed the following method. I am writing the post because I have a feeling this tool could help people in many ways, since it did change how I study in lectures.

How it works in a nutshell

The work flow - photograph, store, generate pdfs

During the lesson I take the photographs of the blackboard with a script I wrote for CHDK. In the script you set the course and week of the semester and this is stored per-picture on the SD card.(more…)

A while ago, when I coded message alert plugins for pidgin and X-chat so each time I get a new message my bumble-b LED display would flash, so I thought I might release the code here for people to use.

Both plugins will execute a command of your choice when receiving a new message.

Hey all,
This past week I managed to do something quite interesting. I got sugar, running on my Nokia N810, compiled for armel.

The trick that made it work was thanks to easy Debian chroot, that got me access to installing sugar without a few good hours of compilation for arm (and I did that before).

Touchscreen is cool!

The first thing that I found pretty neat was running sugar on a touchscreen device. It really felt better, since most people that I let play with my XO and flip its screen 180 degrees naturally try touching the screen, expecting it had a touchscreen. Sugar was actually quite good with it on the Nokia.